A sticky situation
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are currently stranded on the ISS. They arrived on the Boeing Starliner, which was meant to bring them home after eight days. Unfortunately, it has run into tech issues, meaning that the astronauts may be stuck up there for up to eight months.
We started to ponder, what could an extended period of being stuck in space do to your body?
Next we look to the world of psychedelics research, which has currently got itself a little bit stuck.
We also find out more about the Haraldskær Woman, discovered preserved in a Danish bog in the 1800s. Mads Ravn, head of archaeology, research and collections at the Vejle Museums in Denmark, reveals the stories behind the bog bodies and explains how they ended up stuck in the mud.
And staying with the theme of stickiness, we find out what Neanderthals used as glue.
That, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Kai Kupferschmidt Producer: Harrison Lewis, with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Noa Dowling. Sound engineer: Mike Mallen
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
| 0:04.7 | like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:09.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural |
| 0:14.0 | happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can |
| 0:19.7 | also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and |
| 0:22.6 | live radio, everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start |
| 0:29.2 | with our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC |
| 0:33.7 | Sounds. At the weekend, I was reading about a on BBC Sans. |
| 0:45.6 | At the weekend, I was reading about a character described as the anti-hero of space. |
| 0:51.1 | Now, astronauts are more your classic hero types, a bit like Olympic athletes. |
| 0:56.5 | They have this optimism in humanity's potential and wonder at the joys of the universe that generally makes me want to be a better person. Toiahiro Akiyama was not your typical |
| 1:03.3 | astronaut. In fact, he wasn't an astronaut at all. The first civilian and first Japanese person |
| 1:09.7 | in space, |
| 1:17.4 | journalist Akiyama spent a week aboard the Russian Mir space station and hated it. |
| 1:20.8 | You know how some people get motion sick in cars? |
| 1:23.5 | Well, space is apparently worse. |
| 1:28.0 | His fellow cosmonauts said they'd never seen anyone be so sick. |
| 1:32.9 | To make matters worse, Akiyama had given up cigarettes for the trip and spent his time not so much wondering at the earth from afar, |
| 1:37.5 | more desperately wishing he could have a path. |
| 1:41.2 | There's so much to love about his very human reactions to being stuck in space, |
| 1:46.4 | even though he's labelled an anti-hero. To me, the emphasis is definitely on the hero. |
| 1:53.4 | I'm Marnie Chesterton from the BBC World Service. This is Unexpected Elements. |
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